Knowledge Values And Educational Policy

Knowledge, Values and Educational Policy focuses on what schools are for and what should be taught in them, how learning is possible across boundaries, and issues of diversity and equity. Policies and practices relating to schools are also considered. Within this volume, internationally renowned contributors address a number of fundamental questions designed to take the reader to the heart of current debates around curriculum, knowledge transfer, equity and social justice, and system reform, such as: What are schools and what are they for? What knowledge should schools teach? How are learners different from each other and how are groups of learners different from one another, in terms of social class, gender, ethnicity, and disability? What influence does educational policy have on improving schools? What influence does research have on our understanding of education and schooling? To encourage reflection, many of the chapters also include questions for debate and a guide to further reading. Read alongside its companion volume, Educational Theories, Cultures and Learning, readers will be encouraged to consider and think about on some of the key issues facing education and educationists today.

Educational Theories, Cultures and Learning focuses on how education is understood in different cultures, the theories and related assumptions we make about learners and students and how we think about them, and how we can understand the principle actors in education - learners and teachers. Within this volume, internationally renowned contributors address a number of fundamental questions designed to take the reader to the heart of current debates around pedagogy, globalisation, and learning and teaching, such as: What role does culture play in our understanding of pedagogy? What role do global influences, especially economic, cultural and social, have in shaping our understanding of education? How does language influence our thinking about education? What implications does our view of childhood have for education? How do learners negotiate the transition between the different phases of education? How best can children learn the 'school knowledge'? What is a teacher? And how do teachers learn? How do we understand learners, their minds, identity and development? To encourage reflection, many of the chapters also include questions for debate and a guide to further reading. Read alongside its companion volume, Knowledge, Values and Educational Policy, readers will be encouraged to consider and think about some of the key issues facing education and educationists today.

The goal of this volume of Research in Science Education is to examine the relationship between science education policy and practice and the special role that science education researchers play in influencing policy. It has been suggested that the science education research community is isolated from the political process, pays little attention to policy matters, and has little influence on policy. But to influence policy, it is important to understand how policy is made and how it is implemented. This volume sheds light on the intersection between policy and practice through both theoretical discussions and practical examples. This book was written primarily about science education policy development in the context of the highly decentralized educational system of the United States. But, because policy development is fundamentally a social activity involving knowledge, values, and personal and community interests, there are similarities in how education policy gets enacted and implemented around the world. This volume is meant to be useful to science education researchers and to practitioners such as teachers and administrators because it provides information about which aspects of the science education enterprise are affected by state, local, and national policies. It also provides helpful information for researchers and practitioners who wonder how they might influence policy. In particular, it points out how the values of people who are affected by policy initiatives are critical to the implementation of those policies.

This book, jointly authored by two distinguished philosophers and two prominent social scientists, has an ambitious aim: to improve decision-making in education policy. First they dive into the goals of education policy and explain the terms "educational goods" and "childhood goods," adding precision and clarity to the discussion of the distributive values that are essential for good decision-making about education. Then they provide a framework for individual decision-makers that enables them to combine values and evidence in the evaluation of educational policy options. Finally they delve into the particular policy issues of school finance, school accountability, and school choice, and they show how decision makers might approach them in the light of this decision-making framework. The authors are not advocated particular policy choices, however. The focus instead is a smart framework that will make it easier for policymakers (and readers) to identify and think through what they disagree with others about.

An investigation into how schools can influence the developing values of young people is given in this book. The authors first look, from the perspective of educationalists and policy makers, at values within contemporary education; in particular, moral, spiritual, democratic and environmental values together with arts and health education. Secondly, they focus on the values of pupils and schools, examining school aims and mission statements, the formal curriculum, school ethos and assessment of children's development.; Insights are provided with guidance on how values may be most effectively incorporated into the activities of the schools. This book is intended to be of use as a practical and informative guide to all those involved in primary and secondary education and those interested in values education generally.

The promise, embraced by governments around the world, is that the knowledge economy will provide knowledge workers with a degree of autonomy and permission to think which enables them to be creative and to attract high incomes. What credence should we give to this promise? The current economic crisis is provoking a reappraisal of both economic and educational policy. Policy makers and educationists across the world see education as central to economic competitiveness. However, this book asks fundamental questions about the relationship between the economy and education since, in contrast to policy makers’ rhetoric, the relationship between the two sectors is not straightforward. An unorthodox account of the knowledge economy and economic globalisation suggests that autonomy in the workplace and permission to think will be only given to the elite. In this view many aspirant well-educated middle-class young workers are doomed to disappointment. In this book, leading scholars from the US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand discuss these issues and interrogate the assumptions and links between the different elements of education and how they might relate to the economy. Even if we assume that the official view of the knowledge economy is correct, are we educating young people to be autonomous, creative thinkers? Are current policies relating to knowledge, learning and assessment consistent with the kinds of workers and skills required for the knowledge economy? Educating for the Knowledge Economy? will appeal to academics, policy makers, teachers and students interested in the central role of education in the knowledge economy.

Shortlisted for BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed's second Ethnography Awards in partnership with the British Sociological Association! Educational Binds of Poverty tackles the assumptions made by many recent social and educational policy initiatives suggesting that the best way to improve educational prospects of children in poverty is through an increased emphasis upon a culture of control, discipline, regulation and accountability. In this book, Ceri Brown presents these assumptions against a review of the research literature and an original ethnographic longitudinal study into the lives of children in poverty, in order to highlight the gap between policy discourses and the lived experiences of children themselves. Through the theoretical concept of a set of ‘binds’ against educational success, the book explores four key areas that children in poverty have to navigate if they are to be successful in school. These are: material deprivation the cultural contexts of school, home and the community friendship and social capital the effects of student mobility through atypical school changes. In seeking to characterise and explain what life is like for young school children, this book questions why policy makers have a radically different frame of reference in purporting to understand how their policies will change the behaviour of those living in poverty. This leads onto a consideration of what lessons may be learned in order to contribute towards a more appropriate policy agenda that attends to the multiple binds that children in poverty have to negotiate.

The aim of this book is to provide an easily accessible, practical yet scholarly source of information about the international concern for the nature, theory and practices of the ideas of values education and lifelong learning. Each chapter in this book is written in an accessible style by an international expert in the field. The book tackles the task of identifying, analyzing and addressing the key problems, topics and issues relevant to education and Lifelong Learning.